In business, not everything goes smoothly, and it is normal for various problems to emerge endlessly. Of course, in the commercial field, any problem can be solved at the technical level; the core is the cost of solving it. At the same time, before solving a problem, one must first understand the problem behind the problem, or the core issue. What is the ultimate goal of doing business? In plain terms, it is to make money. How does money come about? There are only two directions: increasing revenue and reducing costs. Money earned through external operations is called increasing revenue, while money saved through internal management is called reducing costs. Of course, current bosses mainly focus on external operations, trying every means to increase revenue, such as expanding market areas, adding new products, enlarging company scale, and increasing sales, to achieve more profit. As for internal management, or how to save money through internal management, it is often overlooked by bosses in the early stages. Internal management is simple and crude, and at least the configuration of the back-office management departments and the attention they receive are far less than that of the front-line business departments. The reason for not paying attention may be that business work is too busy to take care of, or the management structure was simple and did not require it, or profits were too high to care. Logically, there are two sources of profit in business: increasing revenue and reducing costs can both create profit, but most bosses believe that making money mainly relies on increasing revenue, while they consider less about how to achieve cost control and save money through reducing costs. In the past, when the market had more space and business was good, focusing on increasing revenue was also correct. But now the market is cold, there are many problems at the operational level, business is hard to do, increasing revenue is difficult, and the profit created through increasing revenue is limited and beginning to decline. At this time, do not keep your mind focused on increasing revenue; you should turn to the other direction—reducing costs—and think of ways. The goal of cost reduction is to control costs and save money. The money saved is also considered earned. Some bosses may think there is no place to save money, or that further saving will affect normal external operations. In fact, in the commercial field, there is infinite room for efficiency improvement; in other words, costs can also be infinitely saved. So, in which specific aspects and through which work can cost control be achieved?

  1. Employee Skills What is the biggest cost of a company? Employees lacking professional skills. In most distributor companies, there is a lack of a systematic employee technical training system. They rely more on the employees' own prior accumulation, or after joining the company, let old employees guide them, or even simpler, completely rely on employees to accumulate slowly in actual work. If professional skills are not in place, work efficiency is low, waste is serious, and it directly brings unnecessary cost increases. In the current market off-season, should we take this work seriously? Whether it is inviting professional teachers from outside to give professional training, inviting salespeople from manufacturers to come for training, or holding experience-sharing sessions among internal old employees, or even just buying relevant technical books and CDs to distribute to employees. At the same time, taking advantage of the current market off-season with relatively more free time, consider increasing the frequency of internal training and technical training.
  2. Transparency in Internal Management When the company has some scale, departments, employees, and matters increase, and problems also increase simultaneously. Before solving problems, the relevant situations must first be made transparent. The so-called transparency is to fully display the current actual situation or existing problems, so that bosses and employees can see all situations and problems in work at a glance, and then provide directional guidance for the design of subsequent solutions. This is like going to the hospital for a check-up; first, you need a physical examination, which is to make the entire body condition transparent, and then formulate a treatment plan based on that. So, which situations need to be transparent?
  3. The company's operating system
  4. Current work plans
  5. The actual progress of individual work
  6. The actual progress of departments or specific projects
  7. Current problems inside and outside the company
  8. The storage situation of office documents and items
  9. The actual storage and in/out situation of warehouse goods
  10. The real technical level of employees
  11. The operating standards and processes of current key business work
  12. Customer resource status
  13. Cleaning Up Work Standards and Processes How should each job be done? What are the execution standards? What is the promotion process? These situations should be clear and unified to ensure the efficiency of work execution. Of course, each employee involved also has standards for how each job should be done, but these standards are self-determined by employees. The trouble is that the standards among employees are often different, which will inevitably lead to problems in management and command, difficulty in improving resource utilization, and even internal disputes. Take advantage of the current market off-season to clean up the company's current work standards and unify them rigidly to avoid internal friction caused by inconsistent standards. In addition, take this opportunity to clean up and clarify related work processes. Through internal discussion meetings, list the currently used processes, analyze and discuss each item based on actual implementation, and determine the process links and order.
  14. Cleaning Up Customer Resources Strictly speaking, there are no one-time customers. Even retail customers may return, and at least they have the value of word-of-mouth communication. Therefore, in the process of company development, there should also be a system for accumulating and revitalizing customer resources. Whether they are downstream distribution customers, retail customers, or ordinary consumers, they all need to be recorded, organized, classified, and corresponding maintenance work arranged. Usually, when business is busy, there is not much time to clean up the customer resources accumulated over the years. Now that there is time, clean up the customer resources, classify them into grades according to value, establish a membership system for consumers, arrange customer relationship maintenance work for distribution and retail customers, and carry out maintenance and revitalization. To make money in business, but the current market is off-season and increasing revenue is difficult, so we must quickly shift direction, improve efficiency in internal management, reduce internal friction, and thus achieve the purpose of saving money. The money saved is also earned. Some bosses may think that doing business still relies on making performance outside to earn money, and saving can only save a few dollars. In fact, extensive management inevitably leads to high internal management costs. Some distributors waste more money in internal management every year than they earn. That is to say, there is still a lot of room for cost control in the internal management of distributors; if squeezed, a lot can be squeezed out. Furthermore, looking at many large international companies, their frequency of launching new products is not high, and their performance growth is also average. In fact, when the scale of the enterprise develops to a certain extent, increasing revenue is already difficult. The sustained stability and growth of profits often rely more on internal management and cost control. This is why the bigger the company, the stingier it becomes. Although the title of this article is about how distributors in third- and fourth-tier markets survive in the off-season, in fact, no matter what level of distributor, and regardless of whether the current external market is prosperous or cold, they must maintain sufficient attention to internal management work, that is, cost reduction. Increasing revenue promotes company development and makes the company bigger; reducing costs ensures company stability and makes the company stronger. Pan Wenfu: Born as a private business owner, he operated a family distributor company for more than ten years. At the same time, he served as sales manager, marketing manager, and trainer in several well-known manufacturing enterprises, possessing dual perspectives and experiences as a distributor owner and a production enterprise distributor manager. His research fields mainly focus on internal management optimization of distributor companies, corporate transformation, innovative business strategies, operating cost savings, and optimization of manufacturer-distributor relations. He has the largest distributor topic database in the country and has maintained long-term material collection and solution research on more than 400 topics related to distributor companies. -END- Content Selection Click the title below to read directly: [Line Sales Representative Practical Operation Guide (with full set of PPT download)]